On Apr 25, 2005, at 11:19 AM, Michael O'Keefe wrote:
C) The whole idea of a whole *class* of metacharacters (space, slash, backslash, backquote, semicolon, etc.) is an idiotic *Unix* practice.
It's only in interactive shells.
And it's still stupid.
The whole idea that quote doesn't shut down the metaness of *every* character except quote is just a stupid design decision from the Bourne shell days propagated 20 years into the future.
quote, or double-quote ?
Pick one. Just make it work.
The problem is that the interactive shells try to do a weak form of programming via string and variable interpolation and thus cause all manner of grief in trying to parse strings.
Your comments about Perl, Python, Java, etc. not needing this are straight to the point. The shell should either be A) a real programming language with all of the expected features rather than a weak pseudo-programming language or B) a file manager that doesn't have all of the attendant idiocies.
The argument is similar to the one for a build system. A build system should be a real programming language with some syntactical/ library helper functions to make commonly used operations convenient. Anything less eventually requires people to tie themselves in knots to work around the problems (see Ant, the Java build system, for example).
-a
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